Stewart Bruce of Washington College gave this tutorial as part of the GT101 course. This demo of how to make an actual layout in ArcGIS ArcMap will show you some tips and ticks to good layouts by running through a complete layout exercise. More information on our GT-101 course can be found at http://geoworkshops.org and more information on the Washington College GIS program can be found at http://gis.washcoll.edu

Residents of Longview, TX (reported on earlier this week – “There’s an app for that – citizen pothole reporting”) with smartphones can get a new mobile app called “CitySend“ created by CitySourced (didn’t credit that company in the first blog) to inform public works officials of their public issues. The mobile app, unveiled by Longview GIS Manager Justin Cure, allows users to take photos, record video and audio of a problem, and automatically provide GPS coordinates. After the report is submitted, users can track all reported problems on a map as well.

It looks like while the U.S. Defense Department got $2 billion lopped off its R&D budget for next, Darpa is looking good as the White House sees it as putting technological innovation as a key to America’s economic recovery.

“I wasn’t in on the end game negotiations, but I did advocate for preserving R&D/S&T department/government wide in a economic down turn,” says Gen. James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who now chairs the defense policy studies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The reasoning being we will need all the competitive advantage we can muster. The Administration was on board with this and fairly explicit in their support of labs and innovation organizations, the best of which they [the Administration] believe is Darpa.”

This week, a smartphone app will be made available to the citizens in Longview, Texas, where pictures and video can help the city address issues such as potholes that need repairing. Starting yesterday, citizens could log on to their smartphones, take a photo or video of a pothole or other problem in the city, note location and send it to the city.

In the urban planning world, 3D technologies now play a major role in enhancing decision-making and information sharing. By creating a compelling geospatial visual connection with internal stakeholders and the public, urban planners are able to provide clear and realistic project information, extending far beyond traditional disconnected model-based details.

In addition, as geospatial solutions are being embraced more in the urban planning arena, 3D enables organizations to better exploit the precision and power of their geospatial data, leading to quicker, more confident decision-making and visual communication in support of location-centric tasks.

We recently announced that the City of Virginia Beach, the most populous city in Virginia, has taken some unique steps to use Intergraph’s GeoMedia 3D to produce more intuitive 3D appraisal maps — showing the location, dimensions and other information pertaining to a parcel of land subject to property taxes — as well as maps requested by other city departments. South Carolina Department of Transportation is another recent GeoMedia 3D announcement.

With integrated 3D solutions, governments, businesses and other organizations can gain a clearer understanding of all of their visual and map data. With such a holistic picture, they are able to reduce errors that can arise from the misinterpretation of images – ultimately enhancing infrastructure management and land information management.

Intergraph continues to be a leader in this space with regular product updates. In fact, we just announced the release of GeoMedia 3D 6.1.1, enabling users to represent existing geospatial datasets in three dimensions through a new 3D map window. Users can also leverage the Live Link capability with this release, connecting the GeoMedia 3D map window to ERDAS IMAGINE®. This enhances the 3D view with ERDAS IMAGINE’s rich raster capabilities to support synchronized data sharing, viewing, editing, updating and analysis. Users can leverage these products together, integrating accurately processed imagery and terrain data from ERDAS IMAGINE.

The City of Virginia Beach and South Carolina Department of Transportation are just two recently announced examples of how governmental organizations can better enhance their overall urban planning with 3D geospatial data processing solutions. As many local governments are dealing with budgetary challenges, it makes complete fiscal sense to implement solutions that fully unleash the efficiency and power of their geospatial data investments.

The underwater volcanic eruption off El Hierro Island continues four months after it began.

Collected on February 10, 2012, this natural color satellite image shows the site of the eruption, near the fishing village of La Restinga. The beautiful aquamarine water indicates high concentrations of volcanic material. Right above the vent a patch of brown water can resemble a turbulent hot tub when the eruption is strongest.

This image was acquired by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. The eruption is just off the southern coast of El Hierro, the youngest of the Canary Islands. El Hierro is about 460 kilometers (290 miles) west of the coast of Morocco and Western Sahara.

According to El Hierro Digital measurements of the sea floor by the Instituto Oceanográfico Español showed that the volcano’s summit is now only 120 meters (390 feet) beneath the ocean surface—10 meters (30 feet) higher than it was in mid January. The height of the erupting cone is about 210 meters (690 feet) from the former ocean bottom, with a total volume over 145 million cubic meters (512 million cubic feet) of new material.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data. Caption by Robert Simmon.

New estimates published this week in the online edition of the journal of Nature reports that Alaska glaciers have been shedding about 46 billion tons of ice each year, making America’s Arctic state the world’s single biggest contributor to glacier-fed sea level rise outside of Greenland or Antarctica. Still, Alaska remains a wee player in the global ice frappe, producing only about 8.5 percent of the world’s annual glacier shrinkage of 526 billion tons, according to the study, led by a team at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Digital maps and online mapping tools are critical to understand authors mindsets, elements of plot and character development. GISetc has created a series of lectures showing how to incorporate GeoSpatial Tools in teaching language arts. These lectures are given by Barbaree Duke. She is a teacher who is developing curriculum & professional development courses to help teachers & students improve test scores & critical thinking with geospatial technologies.

The goal of GISetc TV is to share and create content that:

1. Excites students about GIS.
2. Is a resource for GIS educators and professionals.
3. Shares technological advances in the field of GIS studies.
4. Shares the adventures of GISetc in field studies, training, educational opportunities and more!

Released by an international team of scientists is a laser-radar image of the area surrounding the site of a Magnitude 7.2 earthquake that occurred in Mexicali, Mexico, in 2010. The laser radar technique can spot surface changes of just a few centimetres; in this image the blue represents a post-quake reduction in height and red indicates an increase.